To be shocked at the appalling treatment of Rosemary Kennedy?

[IfyouseeRitaMoreno]

And even more shocked that the Kennedys never suffered the consequences for what they did to her (well the father to be more precise).

I’ve just found out about her story and can’t stop being horrified. Sister to JFK, she had minor developmental issues, was considered mentally deficient because she had sexual liaisons (the horror!) as a teenager.

Her father, Joe Kennedy, took her without the consent of either her or her mother, for a secret lobotomy with a physician Dr James Watts. It left her unable to walk or speak. It gets worse...

So then they dump her in various institutions and barely visit her for 20 years. Her siblings tried to make up for it in some way (JFK passed a law to help mental illness and her sister introduced the Special Olympics) but her parents just abandoned her and NOTHING happened to the physicians Watts and Freedman who did this to her knowing the risks. Except of course that they went on to have illustrious successful careers.

I also read that 80% of lobotomies were performed on women which shocks me even more. Why?

Will someone else be shocked and horrified with me? I guess I’m just that they could do this to their daughter, cover it up, and face no reprisals.

[post edited by MNHQ to remove offensive language]

I did the psychiatry portion of my nurses training in 1975. It was a very traumatic experience; young girl from a wealthy family receiving treatment for attempting to run away...homosexuality was considered a mental illness and one fellow was receiving shock treatment to his testicles in an attempt to treat him. Experimental drug treatment funded by the CIA (despite being in Canada). Ice tub treatments and horse stalls complete with hay for violent people. This was psychiatric care in a modern city at a teaching hospital. I was probably only 18 at the time.

The ‘ r ‘ word............he who must not be named indeed.

To be fair Florance. I Qualified as an RMN in 1996i dont recognise anything you say happened um sure it did but it changed massivly

This is where I did my psychiatry rotation.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Memorial_Institute
It can only have improved.
Despite the CIA funding having ended the legacy continued for some time.

Sadly this is neither unusual nor completely in the past.

I have 2 friends supposedly who have borderline personality disorder. I completely agree it's FAR more likely to be untreated/undx PTSD, one from childhood abuse, one from a traumatic birth (which they DEFINITELY don't want to recognise as that means admitting they MAJORLY fucked up the birth!). One I suspect also has asd, her family never tried to get her any help as they saw it as her fault and pressured her to hide any "odd behaviour" (their words).

I have OCD, depression, anxiety, agoraphobia. I also have endometriosis, a spinal nerve condition, sciatic pain that predates that but made worse by it, and numerous allergies.

EVERY SINGLE ONE I've had to fight to get a diagnosis! Even when there were CLEAR physical symptoms.

Dd has a physical disability, again clear physical symptoms for 8 YEARS, smaller symptoms before that. Prior to her dx I was fighting to get her dx - I'll admit at first I though it was just clumsiness, possibly a hearing issue (affecting balance maybe) but when worse symptoms came along and I tried to get her dx I was treated as if I was being an over-reacting, paranoid attention seeking mother!

Similar to a pp when we DID finally get her referred to a specialist, specialist took one look at her (symptom free at this point but certain physical characteristics I now know are part of the condition) and was pretty sure she knew what was wrong. Investigations confirmed. She too wrote a strongly worded letter to my GP practice (the year preceding there's been a lot of classic symptoms showing up in dd) basically I guess gave them a right bollocking for ignoring us! Leaving a child in unnecessary pain and risking her becoming so disabled she could have needed crutches/frame/wheelchair (this may still unfortunately be in dds future).

I started a thread a few months back after coming across an article about how women are STILL more likely to be seen as 'neurotic' or 'hysterical' than to have concerns about ANY Symptoms taken seriously by GP's.

Women take up to 4 times longer to get a referral to a specialist - any specialist for any illness! Than a man.

I looked and found more research that found that Drs presented with EXACTLY THE SAME case history/symptoms gave DIFFERENT dx depending on if they thought the patient was male or female (also depending what they thought ethnic origin was - that's a whole other thread!)

I was pretty much shouted down as being...hysterical and paranoid!

Op is right it IS truly shocking and unacceptable but I am begging mners to recognise that it is NOT much better now. That we are STILL facing issues with getting taken seriously, getting correct dx.

Because Drs (including female Drs) are still seeing women as unnecessarily overly concerned with health matters, more 'neurotic' than male patients.

What I will say (and I hope you guys understand what I'm getting at here) is that while lobotomy has rightly been discredited and is largely discontinued, as someone with severe OCD which is believed by many experts to have a neuro-physiological element to the cause starting in the frontal lobe, I can totally understand patients suffering as I do or worse, being desperate enough to consider or even agreeing to undergo lobotomy as a potential cure. If there was a low risk, well researched surgical option for this fucking awful illness to literally be cut out of my brain? I'd definitely consider it!

Her treatment is shocking but I don't think it was massively out of step with treatment meted out by other families at the time.

My great great uncle had epilepsy. Our family weren't rich but there was enough money to buy a house for his sister (my great grandmother) and her family with room to accommodate him. He was born around 1890 and was cared for by his sister from early childhood as their own Mother died while they were young. She was the only girl in a family of 8 or 9 boys.

My grandfather (born 1920s) would recount tales of terrible and frightening seizures. How they used to keep his presence secret and not tell people because of the stigma.

At some point he was started on phenobarbitone. Surmising from the future it sounds like this stopped a lot of his seizures but my Dad's childhood tales (he was born in 1950) were all about a man who was by this time severely damaged by the combination of seizures and the side effects of medication.

After the arrival of the NHS they were really worried that he would be removed from the family home and put into a residential environment. He died at home in the early 1950s probably as a result of a seizure.

I suspect if the money had been available and lobotomy touted as a cure my family might have opted for it.

I know someone who had a leucotomy for severe OCD in the 90s.

For reference I have very strong objection to use of the r word. I find people trying to justify its use with 'medical terminology' etc really frustrating.

BUT on mentioning to MNHQ I did ask for posts to be edited rather than deleted as it's a good discussion. Lily said this wasn't possible which considering that's what has now been done is confusing to say the least.

Hi all,

Really sorry for any confusion here - we're not going to be editing posts retrospectively but we did say that going forward, we will allow asterisks or 'the 'r' word' in this context. We edited the posts that we felt could be edited and deleted posts that we felt couldn't be edited.

We understand that there are times like this when it's hard not to use a different word because the entire point of the conversation is about how awful the word is, however, there are a small handful of words that we just think are so offensive and cause so much upset that when they appear on the boards, we zap them on sight.

We hope this explains things a little bit.

But moron is okay? MN is so inconsistent.

Yourenoteric - I can understand being desperate enough to hope it would work.

I wasn't dx until 2000's (partly even largely due to not seeking help due to embarassment/shame - and you'd be amazed at how adept one can be at hiding it! I have a new support worker and was describing my daily "stuff" inc several things I'd done/avoided just by her coming here! From how I answer to door, to how I position myself in relation to proximity to another person etc
she hadn't noticed any of them!)

Treatment is still very hit and miss and I personally feel the condition is still very misunderstood - mainly because (as we've been discussing) Drs don't LISTEN to the patients. Yet we're the experts! We're living it EVERY DAY! And that applies to ALL chronic conditions.

Will the R-word be zapped from the threads I posted links to upthread? Some of them are several years old and the R-word has been allowed to stand. There were lots of others too, all of them can be found via the search function. You know, for sake of consistency

A shame this nonsense killed most of the discussion.

A victim of the war on women.

"A psychiatrist present at the lobotomy asked Rosemary to tell him stories and repeat the months of the year. The doctor kept scraping away brain tissue until Rosemary could no longer talk."

Jesus fucking christ.

Agree with other posters that treatment of this kind was routine for women and girls who stepped outside the very narrow role / what they were supposed to do and be like.

There were elderly women in institutions who had been locked away when they were teenagers - often due to having had sex (or to be honest been sexually abused - the school of thought that says a girl who has sex before marriage is shameful does not usually draw a distinction) - until recently. A women locked up in the 1920s at 20 would still have been there in 1980 etc and by that point they were not able to come out totally institutionlaised.

Lobotimising I always imagine as more of a USA thing and going on til more recently but I'm not sure if my perceptions are correct.

This attittude persists today with women and medicine and esp mental health diagnoses when there are other things actually wrong with them. We are too quickly dismissed as "mad".

The handling of the birth as well WTF pushing the baby back in for 2 hours? Jesus christ so the mum was tortured during childbirth as well essentially.

Nothingontellyagain and others inc op may be interested to read up on the "mad woman in the attic" trope, arguably the most famous example of its use being in Jane Eyre.

There's a long history of "problematic" women being falsely diagnosed as "mad bad or sad" and the dx being used to discredit them so that a man or men can get away with X y Z.

Freud was even guilty of it to a degree! Pathologising women who'd described childhood sexual abuse as having incest fantasies ffs!

Yes awful. Stuff like this used to go on. I heard a man talking whose father had him lobotomised. His step mother wanted it done as she found him too 'naughty'. No reputable doctor would do it as they could see he was clearly a normal boy (with a nutty step mum) but they found a crank who did the operation. He practiced before hand on a grapefruit. He was left disabled. On the programme he confronted his elderly father who just laughed and excused his own collusion. Incredibly painful to hear. That poor man.
have you read the Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks? A bit different but it talks about the awful experiments that were done on people housed in institutions as they had learning disabilities. It is shocking how recent this all is. Depressing really, how easily we discard the humanity of others.

Thanks Graphista it's awful isn't it

You still see it with a lot of men framing exes as "mad" to all and sundry

Well in terms of 'mad,bad women' my mum eloped with my dad from Ireland. Her mum. my granny, had arranged for her to be institutionalised upon return to Ireland. Her elder brother was sent to track her down and bring her back. Luckily when he did track them down and met my Dad he liked him so left my Mum alone. (Very lucky as mum's brother was over 6foot and used to be a boxer and my Dad was about 5 foot five, if that, and very slight of build).

The thing with using the R word in historical content is that, as in the case of my DUncle, its sometimes the only diagnosis they've ever had. He was diagnosed nearly 60 years ago and although we know he has a low mental age it wasn't until I asked my Dm as a young child what was actually wrong (as in not just the R word label) that she ever thought to question it. Turns out there was no other diagnosis. We know it goes beyond the low mental age too. If I discuss him I normally end up referring to his diagnosis as the R word and adding because that's all they gave at the time.

Labotomies were apparently never mentioned thankfully, though I wonder if they would have been had he been a Daunt instead.

WTF?

@lilymumsnet, what on earth is going on here? You emailed me and said this was a solution!

This is the email I got earlier. I asked MNHQ to reconsider their position. Their response was this:

'there are a small handful of words that we just think are so offensive and cause so much upset that when they appear on the boards, we zap them on sight. Perhaps use the 'r' word or aterisk some letters out?'

I wrote back saying I agreed that using the 'r' word or asterisks would be good.

So how come now, they've gone back on this and can't be bothered to reinstate posts? Even though, as others have pointed out, the full word stands on threads where it is used as a jokey insult. That makes a complete mockery of this, and makes those of us who've discussed the word in the contexts of ourselves or family members look as if we've been insulting people.

Btw (and sorry, I will shut up in a minute, honest), bishop, I have a very strong objection to this word too. As to words like 'ctn' and 'moon,' which may also be banned. I know I've spent far more time than I'd like arguing with MNHQ not to let people use these words as casual insults. But it makes a mockery of those of us who made those arguments to say the terms cannot even be discussed in their historical contexts, because that means we cannot discuss what has happened in very recent years.

@snowbear66 are you able to link your source for those lobotomy statistics please?

It's ridiculous to suggest educated adults have to use 'R word' like children not permitted to swear, when discussing past diagnosis and treatment.

FFS.